The Earth shakes every 26 seconds, and scientists aren’t sure why.

Like a lot of strange happenings, it was first noticed in the 1960s: a small seismic pulse, large enough to register on seismological instruments but small enough to go otherwise unnoticed, occurring every 26 seconds. Jack Oliver, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, documented the “microseism” and sussed out that it was emanating from somewhere “in the southern or equatorial Atlantic Ocean.” Not until 2005 was it determined that the pulse’s true origin was in the Gulf of Guinea, just off Africa’s western coast, but to this day, scientists still don’t know something just as important — why it’s happening in the first place.

There are theories, of course, ranging from volcanic activity to waves, but still no consensus. There does happen to be a volcano on the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea near the pulse’s origin point, not to mention another microseism linked to the volcano Mount Aso in Japan, which has made that particular explanation more popular in recent years. Though there’s no way of knowing when (or even if) we’ll learn the why of this phenomenon, one thing’s for sure: better a microseism than a macroseism.

Killer whales are actually dolphins.

There are a few common misconceptions about killer whales, such as how they’re often seen as bloodthirsty creatures that hunt humans. (They don’t — killer whale attacks are incredibly rare.) But the biggest confusion about these black-and-white ocean dwellers is right in their name: They aren’t really whales. The Orcinus orca is actually the largest species in the Delphinidae (aka dolphin) family, weighing as much as 350 pounds at birth and growing up to 32 feet long during its 30- to 50-year lifespan. But in comparison to most whales — like the 100-foot blue whale, the largest animal on our planet — orcas are relatively small. Biologists also group killer whales with dolphins because of their aerodynamic body shape, which helps them reach speeds of up to 34 miles per hour, and their use of echolocation for hunting and navigation.

So why do we call them killer “whales”? The name stems fromsailors of old, who witnessed the massive dolphins hunting whales (and other large marine mammals) together, and originally called them “whale killers.” Over time, the name was reordered, giving orcas a reputation as fierce and dangerous predators. These oceanic dolphins are clever hunters, known for beaching themselves to feast on seals and sea birds, and for working in pods to take down larger prey like great white sharks. But they’re also extremely social marine animals that spend their lives in matriarchal groups with as many as 40 members. Killer whales are so focused on community building that pods often host “greeting ceremonies” to meet members of other groups or welcome new babies, and hold aquatic funerals to mourn podmates. And the most reputation-busting research shows they might just like belly rubs.

Leonardo’s surname wasn’t “da Vinci.”

I f you’ve ever referred to Leonardo da Vinci as simply “da Vinci,” you weren’t actually using the Renaissance icon’s last name. In fact, he didn’t even have one in the traditional sense. The painter’s full name was Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, meaning “son of ser Piero from Vinci” — Piero being his father’s name and Vinci being the village where he was born. (For fictional equivalents, think of Helen of Troy or Anne of Green Gables.) Many other Renaissance artists, including the other three inspirations for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, are usually known mononymously even if they did have last names: Donatello’s full name was Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, Raphael’s was Sanzio da Urbino, and Michelangelo’s was Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.

Though best known for works of art such as the “Mona Lisa,” “The Last Supper,” and “Salvator Mundi,” Leonardo was also a highly scientific thinker credited with numerous inventions. He designed a flying machine called an ornithopter, an armored fighting vehicle known as Leonardo’s tank, and an ideal city that’s been hailed for how forward-thinking it was, among many other innovations and ideas. For all that, he was not a prolific creator, and most of his pieces have been lost to time.

In 1973, Jimmy Carter reported seeing a UFO.

In addition to having one of the most remarkable post-White House lives of any president, Jimmy Carter had one of the most interesting trajectories toward the Oval Office. That includes not only being a peanut farmer but also reporting seeing a UFO in 1973, at which time he was governor of Georgia and three years away from being elected to the nation’s highest office. The actual sighting took place in 1969, while Carter was visiting the Lions Club in Leary, Georgia. In his report, he wrote that “a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared. It didn’t have any solid substance to it, it was just a very peculiar looking light. None of us could understand what it was.”

An amateur astronomer with a strong knowledge of physics stemming from his time in the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine program, Carter insisted that what he saw wasn’t Venus, as some skeptics suggested, and that 10 to 12 others witnessed it as well. He also vowed to encourage the government to release “every piece of information” about UFOs to the public if he were to become president, though he ultimately opted not to do so for fear that the information could have “defense implications” that might risk national security.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

The plan for how to run the country if Trump is re-elected, 2025, is a total disaster for the majority of us. The control of everything including health matters, the removal of anything that looks like a benefit, handout to the republicans, will be done away with. The people behind this massive rape of the country are the ultra wealthy that got where they are because this country provided them the opportunity to become rich. Now they want to deny that opportunity to anyone and everyone else.
They are supposedly all good christians, church goers and people of good moral conscience and yet they have collectively written a manifesto of ideas that speaks of control and punishment. Watch your neighbor, spy on their every move and report back if you believe they are doing things that are not approved, you will be rewarded. The places you better not watch and report on are the houses of the rich, they can do no wrong.
Extreme ego and a feeling of self righteousness are driving this train. There is no reason for public support like social security, we the wealthy have plenty to take care of ourselves, you should have saved and you would have enough as well. Oh, you say you worked in my factory for 50 years and were never paid enough to have savings, well then die and reduce the surplus population. Sounds a bit like the Scrooge tale.
These upstanding citizens want to turn the clock back at least a couple of hundred years. They do not want women to vote or have a voice in decisions especially when it comes to personal health and childbirth. They would like to readopt slavery and do away with voting rights for all but the very wealthy and of course you must be white.
The campaign from the republican side has again descended into the calling of names and lies upon lies to convince everyone that their opponents are unfit, untrustworthy and just totally corrupt. This is the view they have looking in the mirror so why should it not be what they see looking at others.
The burning question that is not being asked has to be Why did you as a party nominate a 34 count convicted criminal to represent you? This man put the country further in debt in one term than collectively all the administration in the previous 50 years had done. He lies to all of us and yet your party persists in their worship of him. He has already called for violence if he loses again. He has stated that if he wins this time around he will fix it so you never have to vote again and all will be good. He will have set up his empire and will expect that his sons will follow him as dictator forever, as long as they are Trump.
If that future comes to be then all of you devoutly religious people will have nothing left but to sit on your butts and pray for assistance and read your book of fiction that was written by men that were just as screwed up and stupid as the one you electe

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Things are looking positive Harris is a strong candidate for the White House even though Biden was and is still doing a stellar job as President. My warning is don’t get complacent, we assumed that the malignant narcists would not beat Clinton in 2016 but we all know what happened.

In 2016-2018-2020 the GOP didn’t have a defined plan, well at least not one that they had publicized but now they do and their blueprint is the demise of democracy, so in that vein I and going to post pieces of the 2025 Project so that maybe some of us will realize the threat is real.

How would Project 2025 impact troops and veterans?

By Jonathan Lehrfeld

 Wednesday, Jul 24, 2024

Spencer Chretien, left, and Kristen Eichamer stand in the Project 2025 tent during the playing of the national anthem at the Iowa State Fair, Aug. 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. (Charlie Neibergall/AP)

Banning transgender troops from service, revoking the VA’s ability to provide abortion-related care and slashing the number of general officers in the ranks are just a few of the policy proposals laid out in a political playbook for what the next Republican administration could look like.

Known as Project 2025, the plan organizedby the conservative think thank The Heritage Foundation would make sizable changes to the lives of service members and veterans if implemented.

The lengthy guidebook that seeks to reform several facets of the federal government has taken the spotlight in the 2024 presidential race.

While Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, Democrats have called the agenda a “dangerous blueprint” for what his second term could look like.

Project 2025 was authored by many officials who served in the first Trump administration.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump said in July on Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

He doubled down on that message just days later, and did so again in a campaign speech delivered following an attempted assassination against him.

But Democrats are not ready to let him off the hook yet. Vice President Kamala Harris, who received an endorsement from President Joe Biden to serve as the next commander-in-chief after he dropped out from the presidential election this past weekend, warned in a social media video that Trump and his team intend to implement Project 2025.

What exactly is Project 2025?

The Project 2025 initiative includes a roughly 900-page policy agenda, a personnel database for those who could serve in the next Republican administration, a training for those individuals called the “Presidential Administration Academy” and also plans for a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of office.

The effort includes recommendations by former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, and has been led by other former Trump administration officials including Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to the president and associate director of presidential personnel.

Policy recommendations stretch across the executive branch, from the White House to the Department of Justice to independent regulatory agencies, each broadly seeking to reduce the size and scope of the federal government.

“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” a prelude to the handbook states.

The “administrative state” refers to executive branch agencies exercising the power to create, enforce and adjudicate their own rules. Those who oppose such a setup, primarily Republicans, argue that unelected officials should not have such powers.

How would Project 2025 impact troops?

The policy chapter on remaking the Department of Defense includes reducing the number of generals and reinstituting policies barring transgender individuals from serving in the military.

That portion of the guidebook was written by Miller, who served as acting defense secretary in the final months of the Trump administration.

“Our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, our impossibly muddled China strategy, the growing involvement of senior military officers in the political arena, and deep confusion about the purpose of our military are clear signals of a disturbing decay and markers of a dangerous decline in our nation’s capabilities and will,” Miller wrote.

Some of the suggested personnel changes Miller put forth fall in line with conservative culture war arguments, including:

• Reinstating service members to active duty who were separated for not receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, restoring their rank and providing them back pay.
• Abolishing diversity, equity and inclusion offices and staffs.
• Reversing a policy that lets DOD cover travel costs for troops seeking reproductive care, including abortion services.
• Eliminating “Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs,” which the text does not provide examples of.

Other prescriptions include:

• Suspending the use of the recently introduced Military Health System Genesis, where military applicants are medically examined before they can sign up.
• Requiring completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the military entrance examination, by all students in schools that receive federal funding.
• Increasing the Army force structure by 50,000.
• Aligning the Marine Corps’ combat arms rank structure with the Army’s.
• Maintaining between 28 and 31 larger amphibious warships as opposed to the what is specified in current Navy shipbuilding plans.
• Increasing F-35A procurement to 60–80 per year.
• Providing necessary support to Department of Homeland Security border protection operations.
• Improving base housing and considering the military family “holistically” when considering change-of-station moves.

Separately, in a chapter dedicated to revisions to the Department of Homeland Security, it was suggested that the Coast Guard, which currently operates under DHS during peacetime, be transferred out to another department.

Ken Cuccinelli, a former DHS official from the Trump administration, who wrote that section of the guidebook, said the maritime service should instead be moved to the Department of Justice when not at war, or alternatively to DOD for all purposes.

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How would Project 2025 impact veterans?

The policy chapter on reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs involves rescinding VA’s ability to provide abortion services and revising hybrid and remote work options for the department’s employees.

That section of the handbook was written by Brooks Tucker, who served as the VA’s acting chief of staff in the last year of the Trump administration.

“The VA must continually strive to be recognized as a ‘best in class,’ ‘Veteran-centric’ system with an organizational ethos inspired by and accountable to the needs and problems of veterans, not subservient to the parochial preferences of a bureaucracy,” Tucker said.

Changes that Tucker advocated for include:

• Rescinding all departmental clinical policy directives related to abortion services and gender reassignment surgeries.
• Reviewing in-person work options. Tucker cited that, specifically for VA staff in the nation’s capital, the remote work policy is “undermining the cohesiveness and competencies of some staff functions and diluting general organizational accountability and responsiveness.”
• Requiring Veterans Health Administration facilities to increase the number of patients seen each day to equal the number seen by DOD medical facilities: approximately 19 patients per provider per day. Currently, Tucker said, VA facilities may be seeing as few as six patients per provider per day.

Not everyone however agreed with taking that approach.

“VHA healthcare providers need to spend more time with veterans during their appointments to effectively address their complex health needs,” Russell Lemle and Jasper Craven, from the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, wrote in a Task & Purpose op-ed. “By demanding that VHA facilities match the patient volume at DOD facilities, Project 2025 risks shortchanging veterans and compromising the quality of care they receive by treating them as if they are in the prime of their youth,” they added.

Other recommendations from Tucker included:

• Embracing the expansion of Community Based Outpatient Clinics without “investing further in obsolete and unaffordable VA health care campuses.”
• Revising disability rating awards for future claimants while “preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants.”
• Establishing a veterans “bill of rights” so vets and VA staff know exactly what benefits veterans are entitled to receive.
• Transferring all career Senior Executive Service individuals out of specific positions on the first day to “ensure political control of the VA.”

Michael Embrich, a former member of the Advisory Committee on the Readjustment of Veterans, shared in an op-ed for GovExec that following Project 2025′s plans to reshape the government workforce “would disproportionately affect veterans, many of whom rely on these positions not only for employment but also for a sense of purpose and community.”

When Churchill Met Lincoln(’s Ghost)

Abraham Lincoln’s assassination is one of America’s defining historical events, and the trauma lasted long after his death. Our 16th — and, according to many rankings, best — President is the White House’s most famous ghost, having been sighted more than any other spirit. In a way, those sightings include a chilling prophecy Lincoln experienced himself. One evening early in 1865, Lincoln told his close friend Ward Hill Lamon of a troubling dream he’d had a week and a half earlier:

“I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs … I arrived at the East Room. Before me was a catafalque [raised platform for a coffin], on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer. ‘He was killed by an assassin.’”

Lincoln was assassinated just a few months later, and sightings of the fallen leader in the room now known as the Lincoln Bedroom began not long after. According to Jared Broach, founder of the ghost tour company Nightly Spirits, “They say Lincoln always comes back whenever he feels the country is in need or in peril. They say he just strides up and down the second-floor hallways and raps on doors and stands by windows.”

It isn’t just humans who have felt this presence. Rex Scouten, then the White House curator, said in 1989 that Ronald Reagan’s dog felt comfortable roaming through every room in the White House except the Lincoln Bedroom, where “he’d just stand outside the door and bark.”

No less a credible source than Winston Churchill himself reported encountering Lincoln’s ghost in that very room, albeit under different circumstances. He had just stepped out of the bath and was “wearing” nothing but a cigar when he saw the former President by the fireplace. “Good evening, Mr. President,” Churchill reportedly said. “You seem to have me at a disadvantage.” Indeed he did, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else being so witty in that moment.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

We have a new candidate on the ticket, or at least that is how it looks, the nomination has not happened yet. That being said and with good fortune it is likely that the popular vote will go with this candidate. What do we do with the electoral college? This is a band of bought and paid for individuals that tend to elect rich white men.

    This is not the year for them to make the choice for the rest of us. That could mean another 4 years or longer of an inept individual that has no business being President. It in turn would mean Project 2025 would be implemented and we do not need that. 

   The very thought of having this group that is selected out of gerrymandered districts that vote only one way is unacceptable. A request should be made to the President that the electoral college be disbanded immediately. The purpose in the beginning was to offset the lack of education of those allowed to vote in favor of the rich white property owners who obviously knew best what was good for the country. Does that sound biased?

    Granted the republican party with their book banning and burning and the censure on what can or cannot be taught. They may again bring our nation to the point of illiteracy that was common in 1790 but for the present it has not. 

   The populations of the world have for far too long been at the mercy of a few that claim to know what is best for all. It happens with wealth and it happens with religion. The idea that all the answers are in the rich man’s spreadsheet or the book of stories that should not be viewed as more than stories. The stories were written by men as they tend to elevate men and suppress women. They are also very harsh in the treatment of those that are considered not to be of equal status. Another example of men being the authors is the use of defamatory language to describe others. If you were God would you call your daughter a whore?

    Others are concerned with this outdated process and have started a campaign to get rid of it. We are at a point in our history where it is important that all of us take an interest in our collective future. The idea that someone else is going to do it just does not work. Believing that someone will clean it up does not pick up the trash along our highways nor does it clean up the mess that misguided or corrupt public officials create. 

    Our nation’s capital is a very grand looking place, it also reminds one of a place that can hide a lot of stuff from view. The new German parliament buildings are built with lots of glass and places for the public to watch and listen to what is going on in the chamber. We need more open relations with our government and we need to be able to interrupt them when they get off the course of what they have been elected to do, which is not to find fault with the other party. They are supposed to be there to resolve differences, not make mountains out of mole hills.

   The other issue of greater concern is that more youth need to take part in the process as they are the ones that will ultimately have to pay the bills of tomorrow so they should have a say in what is being spent today. We can only guess at what those changes will ultimately look like but with planning and compassion for our fellow humans it is possible to make everyone comfortable. As we age most of us realize that great wealth and fame are not to be ours. So like the song from My Fair Lady, “All I want is a room somewhere far away from the cold night”. Everyone should have at least that much not to die in a tent under an overpass or worse. 

   The point is that Trump and Project 2025 is almost a guarantee of many being under the overpass while a very select few will enjoy the warmth of lavish accommodations at the expense of the majority of society.